Recovery Revisited

What does it mean to revisit recovery?

For me, it means being willing to question some of the things I once believed were absolute without dismissing what helped me get here. It means looking at my own biases, staying curious, and recognizing that my recovery doesn’t have to look like someone else’s recovery.

When I first got sober twelve years ago, I didn’t think that way. I attended AA meetings four or five times a week. I needed the structure, accountability, community, a sponsor, and the experience of working the Steps. At that point in my life, it was exactly what I needed. It also shaped how I believed recovery was supposed to look for everyone else.

Over the years, working with individuals and families challenged that belief. I began to understand that revisiting recovery wasn’t about rejecting what worked for me. It was about making room for what might work for someone else.

There were phrases I heard all the time in AA like “meeting makers make it” and “we’ll love you until you love yourself.” Some of those messages were extremely helpful to me, especially in early recovery when I needed connection and other people around me who understood what I was going through.

There were other parts that I struggled with. I was often told that when people stopped going to meetings, they relapsed and destroyed their lives. There were times I felt shamed if I didn’t want to go out for fellowship, skipped a meeting, or didn’t attend an event. I was also taught that certain medications, including medication-assisted treatment, meant someone wasn’t really sober, even when those medications were prescribed and managed by a medical professional. At the time, AA was really the only recovery framework I knew, and many of those beliefs became my own.

I also struggled with the way we counted days and talked about relapse. Someone could have years of recovery, return to use one night and suddenly be back at day one. Relapse often felt like a bad word. There was shame attached to it and a feeling that someone had failed. I worried that this could cause people to keep secrets, and secrets can quickly turn into more destructive behaviors.

Someone who returns to use doesn’t lose everything they learned during the years before it. They don’t lose every relationship they repaired, every coping skill they developed or all the work they put into themselves. I became much more interested in understanding what happened, what led up to it and what could be learned from it.

I also started noticing some inconsistencies. Substance use was heavily scrutinized while other behaviors that could become destructive, including gambling, sex, pornography, gaming and other compulsive behaviors, were sometimes normalized within the same recovery community.

None of this takes away from what AA gave me. AA was an important part of my early recovery and I remain grateful for it. But at that point in my life, it was the only way I really understood recovery.

When I started working in treatment, I based a lot of my early views on what I had learned in AA because that was what I knew. It wasn’t until I went through my recovery coach training and continued my education that my perspective really started to change. I learned more about mental health, family systems, trauma, the physical and emotional effects of substance use, financial and social impacts, and the many barriers people face when trying to access care.

I became much more curious about the whole person and what was actually happening in their life instead of immediately focusing on whether they were using or abstinent.

Instead of immediately asking someone to stop using, I started asking more questions. What does the substance do for them, and what are they hoping to get from it? Is it actually giving them that experience? How is their use affecting their sleep, mood, relationships, school, work, finances, physical health or mental health? What does the life they want look like, and is their substance use helping them move toward it or getting in the way?

This became especially important when I started working with young adults. Many times, the goals of the family were very different from the goals of the individual. A parent might want complete abstinence while their son or daughter wasn’t even sure they had a problem. Telling someone what their goal should be doesn’t necessarily make them want it, and it certainly doesn’t mean they are going to be honest with you.

I started using more motivational interviewing and exploring what harm reduction could look like for each individual. Maybe someone wanted to drink only once or twice a week or limit themselves to two drinks when they went out. We could set that goal together and then look honestly at whether they were able to achieve it. If they weren’t, we could explore why without immediately labeling it as a failure.

Sometimes substance use was about social anxiety and using alcohol or drugs as a social lubricant. Sometimes it was about fitting in or wanting to feel part of a group. Other times someone simply wanted to check out or quiet their mind for a while. Understanding why they wanted to use gave us somewhere to start. We could develop other coping skills and wellness activities and explore whether those could provide some of the same relief, connection or sense of belonging.

Drug testing and breathalyzers also became tools for accountability rather than punishment. They gave us information we could look at together.

Are you meeting the goals you set for yourself? Is your use increasing or decreasing? Are you being honest with yourself and the people supporting you?

It created an opportunity to have a conversation instead of creating more shame.

One young man I coached had a tremendous impact on how I began to understand all of this. He had gone to residential treatment for heroin use after several overdoses and near-death experiences. After treatment, he was prescribed Suboxone. He tried attending AA meetings but felt out of place and judged. He was told that because he was taking Suboxone, he wasn’t sober.

Here was a young person trying to rebuild his life, taking a medication prescribed to support his recovery, and instead of finding community he was experiencing more shame.

I believed the medication was helping keep him alive, so rather than telling him he needed to fit into a recovery community that wasn’t working for him, we explored other sources of support and started building a recovery plan around him as an individual.

He was also struggling with severe anxiety and difficulty sleeping. He had previously been prescribed benzodiazepines and had also used THC in the past to manage anxiety and sleep. At one point he asked me what I thought about using THC.

Early in my career, based on my own recovery experience and the biases I carried around harm reduction, I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer him. Instead of assuming I knew what was best, I relied on the other professionals who knew him and brought the question to his treatment team.

His primary therapist had worked with him for several years and was open to exploring it. We discussed it with his psychiatric provider as well, and the team agreed to see whether medical cannabis could be an option for him. He obtained a medical cannabis card and purchased THC through a dispensary. From there, he and I worked on goals and accountability around when he would use it, how much, why he was using it and, most importantly, remaining honest about it.

He was a full-time student and the pressure of school was affecting his sleep, particularly at night. He agreed that THC wouldn’t be the first thing he reached for. He would first practice the other coping skills we were working on, including journaling, limiting screen time and improving his sleep hygiene. He kept a log next to his bed and tracked when he used a THC gummy for sleep.

Interestingly, he didn’t need it every night. Sometimes just knowing he had another option seemed to reduce some of his anxiety around sleep.

About a year later, he decided he wanted to come off Suboxone. That was his decision and his goal. He felt stable in his recovery and worked with his psychiatric provider on a taper while his care team continued supporting him through the process.

Today he is married, has a child, a successful career and a loving relationship with his wife. He repaired trust with his family and built a life that probably felt very far away during those early days of his recovery. I consider that a success.

His pathway wouldn’t be appropriate for everyone, but that is also what he taught me. There isn’t one pathway that works for everyone.

Experiences like this changed the way I work today. I don’t believe I need to have all the answers for someone else. I need to listen, stay curious, collaborate with other professionals and help the person understand what they want for their own life.

At Pure Life, we start by understanding the individual’s goals. Sometimes they already know what they want and sometimes part of our work is helping them figure that out. We explore what is important to them, what kind of relationships they want, how they want to feel, what wellness means to them and what they are unwilling to lose. Then we can honestly look at whether their current choices are moving them toward or away from those things.

When appropriate, we also bring families into the process because they are often hurting and confused too. Families need education, support and sometimes simply someone who will listen. We collaborate with therapists, psychiatric providers and other professionals because recovery doesn’t happen in a silo.

As coaches, we often see pieces of someone’s daily life that a clinician may not see during a weekly appointment. With the client’s permission, sharing those observations can help the entire team understand what is working, what isn’t and where additional support might be needed.

My understanding of recovery has become much broader. It can include rebuilding trust within a family, finding movement that makes your body feel good, developing healthier relationships, addressing trauma, taking medication, learning how to sleep again, setting boundaries and discovering who you are outside of being identified only by your addiction.

For some people it means abstinence. For others it may mean harm reduction, and someone’s goals can change as they learn more about themselves.

I have watched people begin with no interest in abstinence and later choose it for themselves. I have watched others move away from substances that were destroying their lives while developing different relationships with less harmful substances. I have watched families who had almost completely lost trust and lived in fear of losing someone they loved begin to rebuild that trust and find hope again.

Those experiences have taught me to focus less on defining recovery for someone and more on helping create a space where they feel safe enough to be honest about what is actually happening.

My views on recovery have changed tremendously over the past twelve years, and I’m grateful for that. AA gave me what I needed when I first got sober, but working with individuals and families has taught me that what worked for me isn’t necessarily going to work for the person sitting across from me.

I remain committed to questioning my own biases, staying curious, learning from the people I work with, and remaining open to new approaches. I accept that I don’t have to abandon what's worked for me to make room for something that may work better for someone else. 

For me, that’s what it means to revisit recovery.